There is a lot of shouting about climate change, especially in North America and Europe. This makes it easy for the rest of the world to fall into a kind of silence – for Westerners to assume they have nothing to add and let the so-called “experts” have their say. But we all need to talk about climate change and raise the voices of those who suffer the most.
Climate science is vital, but by contextualizing this science with the stories of people actively experiencing climate change, we can begin to be more creative about technological solutions.
This not only has to happen at large international meetings like COP26, but also in everyday life. In all powerful rooms where decisions are made, there should be people who can speak firsthand about the climate crisis. Storytelling is an intervention in the climatic silence, an invitation to use the ancient human technology of connection through language and narration to counteract inaction. It’s a way to bring often powerless voices into powerful spaces.
I tried to do that by documenting stories of people who have already experienced the effects of a climate in crisis.
In 2013 I lived in Boston during the marathon bombing. The city was closed and when it was lifted all I wanted to do was go outside: go and breathe and hear other people’s noises. I had to connect to remind myself that not everyone is murderous. In a fit of inspiration, I cut open a box of broccoli and wrote “Open Call for Stories” in Sharpie.
I wore the cardboard sign around my neck. People mostly stared. But some came up to me. When I started listening to strangers, I didn’t want to stop.
That summer, I rode my bike down the Mississippi to hear all the stories people had to share. I brought the sign with me. One story was so sticky that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months, and it ultimately took me on a trip around the world.
“We fight to protect our dikes. We fight for our swamp every time we have a hurricane. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. ”
I met 57-year-old Franny Connetti 80 miles south of New Orleans when I stopped outside her office to check the air in my tires; She invited me to escape the afternoon sun. Franny shared her fried shrimp lunch with me. In between bites, she told me about how Hurricane Isaac 2012 washed away her home and neighborhood.
Despite the tragedy, she and her husband moved back to their property in an RV just months after the storm.
“We fight to protect our dikes. We fight for our swamp every time we have a hurricane, ”she told me. “I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Twenty miles further I could see where the sea sloshed over the road at high tide. “Water on Road” read an orange sign. Locals jokingly refer to the end point of Louisiana State Highway 23 as “The End of the World”. The idea of the road I had ridden underwater was terrifying.
The author at Monasavu Dam in Fiji in 2014.
DEVI LOCKWOOD
Here was a frontline of climate change, a story. What would it mean, I wondered, to put this in dialogue with stories from other parts of the world – from other frontlines with localized impacts experienced through the water? My goal was to listen to these stories and deepen them.
Water is the way most of the world will experience climate change. It’s not a human construct, like a degree Celsius. It is something we see and feel acutely. When there isn’t enough water, crops die, fires rage and people are thirsty. When there is too much, water becomes a destructive force that washes away homes, businesses, and life. It’s almost always easier to talk about water than it is about climate change. But the two are deeply interwoven.
I also wanted to address another problem: the language in which we discuss climate change is often abstract and inaccessible. We hear of a sea level rise of meters or parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what does that really mean for people’s everyday lives? I thought storytelling could bridge that gap.
One of the first stops on my trip was Tuvalu, a low lying coral atoll nation in the South Pacific, 885 miles south of the equator. Home to around 10,000 people, Tuvalu is well on the way to becoming uninhabitable in my life.
In 2014, Tauala Katea, a meteorologist, opened his computer to show me a picture of a recent flood on an island. Sea water had bubbled up near our seat under the ground. “This is what climate change looks like,” he says.
“In 2000 Tuvaluans living on the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka harvests were suffering,” he said. “The root crops seemed rotten and the size was getting smaller.” Taro and pulaka, two starchy staples in Tuvaluan cuisine, are grown in underground pits.
Tauala and his team traveled to the outer islands to collect soil samples. This was due to the ingress of salt water in connection with the rise in sea levels. Since measurements began in the early 1990s, sea levels have risen by four millimeters per year. While this may sound like a small amount, this change is having a dramatic impact on Tuvaluans’ access to drinking water. The highest point is only 13 meters above sea level.
This has changed a lot in Tuvalu. The freshwater lens, a layer of groundwater that floats over denser seawater, has become salty and contaminated. Thatched roofs and fresh water wells are a thing of the past. Every house now has a water tank that is attached to a corrugated iron roof with a gutter. All the water for washing, cooking and drinking now comes from the rain. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and used to wash clothes and dishes, as well as for bathing. The wells have been turned into rubbish dumps.
Families sometimes have to make difficult decisions about water distribution. Angelina, a mother of three, told me that her middle daughter, Siulai, was only a few months old during a drought a few years ago. She, her husband, and her eldest daughter could swim in the ocean to wash themselves and their clothes. “We only saved water for drinking and cooking,” she said. But her newborn’s skin was too soft to bathe in the sea. The salt water would give her a terrible rash. That meant that Angelina had to decide whether she wanted to drink water or bathe her child.
